Why the Nuggets will live on without Karl

I’ve been less than kind to George Karl this season. In spite of that, media voters decided that he was worth top honors and awarded him the 2012-13 Coach of the Year award. But all of a sudden, the Nuggets decided he wasn’t worth keeping around. Of course, I side with the Nuggets. Now, the Nuggets also let Masai Ujiri — who won this year’s executive of the year award — sign with Toronto. With the Nuggets front office in such chaos, should fans be ready for a nosedive back to mediocrity? No! Let’s go over why.

Good players trump all!

There is so much about “team chemistry” in our psyche that it’s easy to ignore a lot of evidence. But the idea that teamwork trumps star power just doesn’t bear out. Keep in mind that 6 of the last 7 champions were decided via airdropped help:

Shaquille O’Neal in 2006 (arrived in 05)

Kevin Garnett in 2008

Pau Gasol in 2009 and 2010 (arrived in 2008)

Tyson Chandler in 2011

LeBron James in 2012 (arrived in 2011)

Good players arrived and very quickly turned their team around. No team wins lots of games without several very good players. The Nuggets won 57 games this season. Now, some of this is thanks to their unfair home court advantage (thanks altitude!). But a lot of this is due to good players. Losing Masai may hurt the Nuggets in the long run in the front office can’t get good players. That said, next season without Masai and Karl, how do the Nuggets look?

State of the Nuggets

As I said, good teams win because they have good players. Last season, the Nuggets had the following players:

Kenneth Faried – 11 wins

Andre Iguodala – 10 wins

Kosta Koufos – 7 wins

Andre Miller – 6 wins

Ty Lawson – 6 wins

Danilo Gallinari – 6 wins

JaVale McGee – 5 wins

Of the Nuggets 57 wins, these 7 players accounted for 51 of them! Now, let’s review the state of these players (and a few others) to see why I’m still optimistic about the Nuggets.

The Bad

Let’s start pessimistically! First, Andre Iguodala has an opt-out clause in his contract. As I’ve mentioned before, he alone pretty much explains the Nuggets’ improvements this season. Additionally, Danilo Gallinari is out with an injury until at least midseason next year. And predicting how players (including Gallo) come back from injuries is really tough. Let’s also not forget that Andre Miller is ancient. I hope he keeps going, but it’s always a risk. That is roughly 20 wins that the Nuggets may lose out on! Still, there’s room for hope.

Corey Brewer is gone!

In his six seasons in the league, Corey Brewer has maintained a True Shooting Percentage of 0.489. For comparison, the average shooting guard has a True Shooting Percentage of 0.537! The “break even” point for shooting from beyond the arc is 33%. Corey Brewer wasn’t even close to this in his time in Denver. In spite of this, Brewer took over 10 shots a game and almost 4 three pointers! For some reason George Karl thought Brewer was a scorer, when all evidence pointed to the exact opposite. In his over 2000 minutes on the court last season, Brewer managed to earn a mere 0.7 wins. Or more accurately, Brewer cost the Nuggets almost 4 wins had they played an average player instead. Luckily, Brewer’s contract has expired. It’s highly unlikely the Nuggets replace Brewer with someone anywhere close to as bad!

Maybe Wilson Chandler can play

Now, don’t get me wrong. Wilson Chandler has no business playing as a power forward or a center. Only an insane and crazy coach would do such a thing. However, towards the end of last season Chandler was shooting well and getting rebounds. If he can indeed play well as a small forward, shoot from the outside, and stay healthy? He might help alleviate the loss of Gallinari. I’m not overly optimistic on this one. However, he’s still young and has had injury problems. So it’s not impossible.

Return of the Lawson?

I was really high on Lawson to start the season. His contract extension was a steal. He was at the perfect age for a breakout season! And then….he was mediocre. Yes, he did help the team win, but compared to his great performance in 2012, this year was a dud. Let’s bring up another player I’m “fond” of. I bashed Westbrook pretty good before this season, in large part due to a mediocre 2012. Now, while Westbrook will likely never be an MVP candidate, he has been very good in the past. This season he returned to that. So, I’m hopeful Lawson can show numbers more like his old self. If he does, that could be between 4-6 wins the Nuggets could get back.

The Nuggets have a really good front court

Raise your hand if your team has LeBron James. If you do, I’ll give you a pass that says you don’t need one or more top bigs. Otherwise, ignore all that small ball nonsense and remember that basketball is a game entirely built to reward tall talented players. The Nuggets are in good shape here.

They have Kosta Koufos and JaVale McGee. Both of these players are 7 feet tall and well above average. Additionally, they have one of the best power forwards in the league in Kenneth Faried. Having three talented bigs is a situation most teams would kill for. Let’s examine the facts though:

Kenneth Faried – 28 minutes per game

Kosta Koufos – 22 minutes per game

JaVale McGee – 18 minutes per game

Are you kidding me? If the next coach can find a way to give this trio 15 more minutes a game between all three of them, the Nuggets would gain 5 wins! If he plays two of them starters minutes, and the third one 24 minutes? That would be worth 10 wins!

Still in good shape

The Nuggets are one of only two teams to have made the playoffs every season since 2004 (the other is the Spurs). They’ve done this by having good — often underrated — players. And their current situation leaves them here. If Iguodala comes back and the Nuggets replace Brewer with a player that can actually shoot, they can be really good. Even if the lose Iguodala, simply playing their bigs more and Lawson playing like his old self will keep them a really good team. In the NBA, good teams require good good players, and for now, the Nuggets still have those.

12 Responses to "Why the Nuggets will live on without Karl"

The possibility exists, of course, that Faried and Iguodala were worth 21 wins in part, because Karl put them in situations to help them excel. He might have hurt them as well. I don’t know. The point is, the way you looked at this, it’s impossible to tell one way or another whether they’ll miss Karl.

It does show you what NBA teams think though, that the coach of the year was fired.

Ken says that Faried and Iguodala’s production may have resulted in part from Karl “put[ting] them in situations to help them excel”. As Prof Berri’s work shows, coaches do not often have a positive effect on player production, so Ken’s theory is unlikely (although certainly possible). We know, for example, that Iguodala was a highly productive player in Philly with different coaches, so it seems more likely that Iguodala, at least, is simply a productive player regardless of coaching.

That said, I’m glad this article focused to some degree on the minutes the players played – the aspect of coaching that does signficantly affect wins and losses. That said, my impression is that most around the NBA view Koufos as a backup player at best and view McGee as a head case. Thus, asking the new GM to keep them as the primary 3 big men, and the new coach to play them even 15 more minutes, seems to me to be unlikely. More likely the new GM will bring in a less productive big man and the new coach will play these players less.

Yes, training at high altitude is helpful, and some adjustment is necessary, (I used to visit my parents in Albuquerque, another mile high city, and was always wiped out for the first 24 hours.)

But we’re talking about world-class NBA athletes that play a high-intensity sport every day against strong competition (and get to take breaks, unlike marathoners and the like). Do we really think that in the course of a game with less than an hour of actual play time, the endurance differential between Denver and other teams is enough to matter?

Put a better way: What evidence is there of this? Is there any way to measure how much of an impact high-altitude adaptation is having on wins? Speed of play, perhaps? Minutes played by opposing players in Denver versus what they usually play closer to sea level? Something?

Are you kidding Ken? Iguodala played to about his career average in WP despite playing on a much more talented team than he has in the past. So not a coaching plus there. It took Karl forever to put Faried into the starting lineup last year even though it was obvious to everyone he is an extremely productive player who should be on the floor for big minutes. Karl basically had no choice but to play him despite his clear dislike for young players and any mistakes they might make. Karl buys into the idea that if you use the guys everyone knows, ie. veterans, then no one blames you if they don’t get the job done even when you have better and more productive younger players.

Firing Karl was the answer to a lot of savvy Nuggets fans prayers. The only concern is if Iguodala leaves then filling in that 10 win hole could become the challenge to shut up the idiots who think Karl leaving was a negative.

@Ken I don’t know about Faried, but Iguodala’s stats did not improve under Karl. The year before he came to Denver, he was averaging .255 WP48. Now he declined to .180 WP48. His career average is .201 WP48. If anything Karl made him worse than average.

“Now, don’t get me wrong. Wilson Chandler has no business playing as a power forward or a center. Only an insane and crazy coach would do such a thing. However, towards the end of last season Chandler was shooting well and getting rebounds. If he can indeed play well as a small forward, shoot from the outside, and stay healthy? He might help alleviate the loss of Gallinari. I’m not overly optimistic on this one. However, he’s still young and has had injury problems. So it’s not impossible.”

I think I may have played a small role in this lack of pessimism on Chandler. :-) So if he turns out to be a bust as a SF also, I’ll take the blame. Though I can’t see how he’ll be worse than Brewer.

“What evidence is there of this? Is there any way to measure how much of an impact high-altitude adaptation is having on wins? Speed of play, perhaps? Minutes played by opposing players in Denver versus what they usually play closer to sea level? Something?”

Ted,

You could look at their record home vs. away, point differential home vs away, or even another high altitude city like Utah and see the same pattern.

It takes about 3 months (if I’m not mistaken) to adjust to higher altitude. If your body doesn’t adjust then you have about 80% of the red blood cells that a Denver Nugget has. In relative terms that’s about the equivalent ofcomparing a woman’s red blood cell count to a man’s. Hence, teams visiting Denver suddenly degrade their team’s stamina by 20%. The Nuggets then do a great job of running the ball up and down the court, playing a fast pace, and wearing out the other team.

Altitude is one of the “secret” cheats that pro franchises have. To illustrate this point look at how many sports teams are in the Denver area – a lot more than the city can sustain. However, with higher wins they cancel out any foregone profits.

Altitude is only one factor. Lots of people looked at it closer and figured out what Denver and Utah have as an advantage is geography. Quite often road teams find themselves on the end of a back to back in these two cities because they are good spots to have a game as they move a team east or west. So teams go against a Texas or California team one night and into Denver or Utah the next night and neither is a short flight so teams might get into town at 3am or later especially if they come from Pacific time. It seems a much more telling factor than the altitude because everyone talks about the only hard part of it is the first few minutes as the body compensates for the reduced oxygen.

An interesting side note on the altitude is it may hurt the Nuggets and Jazz a bit. Research around the pitiful season the Colorado Rockies had last year talked about the hardest part of playing at altitude is the recovery time from a strenuous effort. In the NBA opponents leave town and often get a chance to recover closer to sea level, but the home team has to find their recovery in tougher conditions. The research was around why pitchers arms don’t last long in Denver which is obviously a much different study than how well guys running and jumping can recover, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some minor offset to the geography advantage they have.

As a Nuggets fan, I have been constantly frustrated by Karl, and I’m glad to see him leave. I hope we bring in a coach with enough statistical knowledge to put in smart lineups and use effective schemes. The Nuggets’ lineup issues have been very well documented (thanks Dre), but there’s one that angers me the most. Wins produced uses a positional adjustment, because big men are more productive (i.e. lawson-fournier-iggy-gallo-faried is less productive than lawson-fourmier-iggy-faried-mozgov despite gallo being a better sf than mozgov is a c). Karl seemed to think that small guys were more productive, because he often played Gallo or Chandler at pf and Faried or Randolph at c. However, many coaches would make the same mistake. The same thing goes for shot selection. Miller and Chandler need serious help on their shot selection, as they both shoot too many midrange jumpers. Karl didn’t fix that, but most other coaches would fail to work with them on that. I’d love to see a statistically minded coach come in and not make those errors, but many NBA coaches would make those same mistakes (McGee, after all, is irritating to any coach).

I’m more concerned with Masai’s departure. I was skeptical of the Fournier pick, but he looks like a future starter, and Faried was a great pick. The Iggy trade was a highway robbery, and getting great value for Nene and something for Melo were both great moves. GMs have much more power than coaches, and the average GM is more prone to going against stats. I hope we get a GM better than Masai, but the odds are that our GM will not be quite as good of a decision maker.

@statmandu Ill will shot 41.3% from three. He could be a productive player if his coach would put him at sf and get him to stop taking midrange jumpers.

@Ted Denver teams have historically had a larger home court/field advantage. I’m not going to do the research, but I think I’ve seen the difference quantified somewhere.

I know we hear repeatedly that Denver doesn’t have the population to support 4 teams, but I think that is undervaluing the support the teams get from the rest of the region. Especially in the case of the Broncos. I, personally have tail-gated with people who are season ticket holders from Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, and New Mexico. And there are thousands, if not tens of thousands of season ticket holders up and down the front range. And there are idiots like me, when I lived in Phoenix I would just fly ‘home’ 8 times a year + playoffs.

That’s probably less of a factor for the other sports. You can’t really commit to season tickets when your team has 2-4 games a week, if you are more than an hours drive out of town. But the NFL? America’s passion and only 8 weeks a year? Pretty easy to get people to commit to 5-10 hours drive time.

This post reminded me that the man that has the biggest impact on the NBA, IMHO, is the doctor that told OKC NOT to trade for Tyson Chandler. Chandler for Joe Smith, Chris Wilcox and the rights to DeVon Hardin and it gets rescinded? The risk was two years, and for that pile of dog pooh, OKC would have killed Miami two years in a row. Even letting him WALK would have been smart.

Man, that has to be the MOST bone headed decision in recent NBA history.